The alarm has been tripped. The backdoor is extensive open. And who or no matter’s impersonating the security-system operator on the opposite finish of the telephone line has simply croaked three phrases that no horror film character would ever need to hear: “Look behind you.” The command places Rose (Sosie Bacon), the more and more petrified heroine of Smile, between a rock and a tough place. She has to look, even when each fiber of her being would slightly not. And so does the viewers. We’re locked into her campfire crucible, compelled to comply with the hesitant backward tilt of her gaze, and the anticipatory creep of a digicam that’s sluggish to disclose what that disembodied voice has invited her (and us) to find.

Smile is filled with moments like this. It’s a nasty, diabolically calibrated multiplex scream machine — the type of film that sends ripples of nervous laughter by means of packed theaters, the sort that marionettes the entire crowd right into a synchronized dance routine of frazzled nerves and spilled popcorn. Turn up your nostril, should you should, on the lowly low-cost sting of a leap scare. Smile offers that maligned machine a exercise for the ages. It rattles with aplomb.

The first huge shock arrives earlier than the delayed opening credit, on the emergency psychiatric ward the place Rose works as a therapist. A affected person, quaking with worry, screams of being haunted by a malevolent pressure. And then the distraught lady seizures right into a blankly beaming trance state, as if dosed with Joker toxin, and methodically cuts a gushing wound throughout her throat to match her ear-to-ear smile. It’s a horrible factor to witness, and Rose isn’t simply shaken by the incident. She’s cursed by it, too, as her personal life is slowly invaded by a ghoulishly grinning psychological phantom — an unholy aftershock of tragedy that solely she will be able to see, and which might take the type of individuals she is aware of and loves.

Genre buffs will now observe that the premise echoes one of many nice horror motion pictures of the brand new millennium, David Robert Mitchell’s dreamily sinister suburban creepshow It Follows. (Here, once more, are figures planted within the ominous distance, and stretches of unoccupied background area you start to worry will quickly be occupied.) That’s not the one corpse Smile scavenges. The movie additionally picks from the bones of The Ring, the Elm Street motion pictures, and Drag Me to Hell, and even disposable Blumhouse junk like Truth or Dare. Yet from these leftovers, it cobbles collectively a satisfying meal; scares which are this fiendishly efficient are scarcely diminished by realizing what impressed them.

Expanding his acclaimed 11-minute quick, Laura Hasn’t Slept, right into a full first characteristic, writer-director Parker Finn establishes a prodigious expertise for using our nervous programs like a rollercoaster. He’s internalized and practically mastered a variety of tips of the commerce: foreboding establishing pictures that peer from a extreme overhead vantage or flip the world on its seasick head; transitional cuts so laborious and sharp they approximate somebody lurching out of a nightmare. Smile has little mercy. It jolts with electrical precision. At the identical time, Finn varies the ways, realizing when to take much less crude routes beneath our pores and skin. There’s a party scene that distorts the cheerful serenading right into a spooky reverberating incantation, earlier than unwrapping a really sadistic shock. And the good character actor Rob Morgan drops by for a terrific one-scene cameo that proves how a lot simulated terror can goose the actual variety; his uncooked emotion is insidiously infectious.

Plotwise, the entire thing’s slightly inventory. It has its clunky, compulsory parts, together with a lopsided love triangle that simply fills up area between superlative bursts of funhouse mayhem. And the story ultimately shades into a kind of novice expository investigations horror heroines so typically embark upon, as Rose traces again a string of suicides, uncovering what the viewers will determine just a few reels earlier. Will it shock anybody to study that the actual monster of this 2022 monster film is trauma itself? In Smile, that cobwebbed conclusion strikes from subtext to express textual content: The menace, slightly actually, is PTSD as a transmissive hex, whereas the climax hinges very bluntly on confronting demons of a private, childhood selection. Yet Finn hasn’t put the cart earlier than the horse, as some highfalutin horror movies from the previous decade have. He’s made a mainstream fright flick too genuinely, unpretentiously scary to be confused for a therapeutic train.

Maybe too darkly humorous, too. There’s a contact of midnight-black humor to a psychological well being skilled stubbornly rationalizing her supernatural misfortune. Rose has, in any case, been on the opposite aspect of such paranoia. What would she inform a affected person seeing visions after a traumatic expertise? Bacon, daughter of Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, finds the drama and the comedy of this ordeal. Her Rose has an amusing behavior of managing her mounting misery, tagging a sheepish “Sorry” onto the tip of every freak-out.

Smile finally ends up drawing some grim conclusions. It’s “actually about trauma” in a slightly unsparing method, with little curiosity in regurgitating comfortingly cathartic platitudes. One would possibly even establish, in its apocalyptic haunted-house climax, a merciless rebuttal to the Babadook Recovery Plan. But if this studio shocker in the end proves a bitter tablet to swallow, it’s been sugarcoated in nearly joyously energetic craft, the plain delight Finn takes in dousing us all in gallons of premium goosebump gas. Horror followers, not less than, will stroll out with an exaggerated rictus of their very own.

Smile opens in theaters in every single place Friday, September 30. For extra of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please go to his Authory web page.

Editors’ Recommendations